Saturday, 17 November 2018

Hey everyone - sorry for not posting much lately. As I've mentioned, I'm working the day job, going to night classes, and only occasionally getting a few hours here and there to get my honey from the hive, visit friends or do other chores. This will be temporary, but in the meantime keep checking in. This piece originally appeared in Low-Tech Magazine several years ago.

We tend to think of technology as rock and metal – from the
Stone Age to the Iron Age, from pyramids and statues to Viking swords and
pirate cannons. We think of the things that survive to be placed in museums, in
other words, and tend to neglect the early and important inventions that
ordinary people used every day but whose materials did not survive centuries of
exposure.

Baskets, for example, have been replaced by plastic and
other kinds of factory-made containers in almost every area of life, appearing
today mainly as twee Easter decorations. Making them has become synonymous with
wasting time – “basket-weaving” in the USA is slang for an easy lesson for slow
students. The craft of basketry, however, might be one of our species’ most
important and diverse technologies, creating homes, boats, animal traps,
armour, tools, cages, hats, chariots, weirs, beehives, chicken coops and
furniture, as well as all manner of containers.

Virtually all human cultures have made baskets, and have
apparently done so since we co-existed with ground sloths and sabre-toothed
cats; for tens of thousands of years humans may have slept in basket-frame
huts, kept predators out with basket fences, and caught fish in basket traps
gathered while paddling along a river in a basket-frame boat. They might have
carried their babies in basket papooses and gone to their graves in basket
coffins.

The earliest piece of ancient basketry we have comes from
13,000 years ago, but impressions on ceramics from Central Europe indicate
woven fibres -- textiles or baskets – up to 29,000 years ago. (1) We have clues
that the technology might be far older than that; in theory, Neanderthals or
some early hominid could have woven baskets.

“The technology of basketry was central to daily
living in every aboriginal society,” wrote ecologist Neil Sugihara, and baskets
“were the single most essential possession in every family.” (2) Early humans
must have regularly cropped basketry plants as they would edible plants, and
burned woodlands to encourage their growth, according to anthropologist M. K.
Anderson. Anderson even proposes that some of the first agriculture might have
been to grow basketry crops, not food crops. (3)

….

Eel trap, courtesy of Wikicommons

Baskets come in several main types. Coiled baskets appeared early, created by
winding flexible plant fibres from a centre outward in a spiral and then sewing
the structure together. Their spiral nature, however, limits them to circular
objects like bowls or hats. Beehive containers, called skeps, were built this
way for hundreds of years, and straw hats still are today.

The earliest American baskets were twined; fibre was wound
around a row of rigid elements like sticks – wrapped around a stick, twisted,
wrapped around the next one and twisted again. The sticks would seem to limit
this approach to flat surfaces like mats, but bending and shaping the sticks
allows twining to create a variety of containers and shapes.

Still others were plaited, with flexible materials
criss-crossed like threads through cloth. The Irish flattened and plaited
bulrushes for hundreds of years into mats and curtains. Here too, the approach
would seem to limit plaiting to flat surfaces, but as the rushes must be woven
while green and flexible and harden as they dry, they can be plaited around a
mould to create boxes, bags or many other shapes.

Wicker, however, probably remains the most versatile
technique, weaving flexible but sturdy material like tree shoots around upright
sticks that provide support. Wicker is the form used for fences, walls,
furniture, animal traps and many other advanced shapes, and when you picture a
basket, you’re probably picturing wicker too. (4)

….

Once early humans mastered the technique of fashioning
wicker, they began using it for a variety of purposes beyond carrying and
preparing food, and shelter probably came next. Wattle fences were made with a
row of upright poles with flexible wood cuttings woven between them, a basket
wall. Unusually, they could be made in modular, lightweight pieces a metre or
two high and a metre or two across – hurdles -- and then uprooted, carried to a
new location, and stamped into the ground where needed.

The uprights, sometimes called zales or sails in Britain,
were typically rounded at the end and placed in a wooden frame, sometimes
called a gallows, to hold them in place. Then withies – slim cuttings of willow
or hazel – were wound back and forth around the uprights. At the end of the
hurdle the withy would be twisted for greater flexibility, wound around the
last zale, and woven back in the other direction. Usually a gap would be left
in the middle of the hurdle, called a twilly hole, which allowed a shepherd or
farmer to carry a few hurdles as a time on his back.

According to author Una McGovern, hurdle fences were vital
to medieval agriculture; by keeping sheep confined without the need for
permanent infrastructure, they allowed tenant farmers to graze sheep on a patch
of land, letting them manure the fields one by one and deposit the fertilisers
necessary for cereal crops. (5)

The same technique could form the walls of a house, once a
log or timber frame was built and the wattle filled in with a “daub” plaster
for insulation and privacy. The daub often contained clay, human or animal hair
and cow dung, and hardened around the wattle like concrete around rebar. The
resulting structure could last for centuries, and even now restoring or
demolishing old buildings sometimes reveals wattle inside the walls.

Similar techniques were used by cultures around the world,
from Vikings to Chinese to Mayans. While their cheap and easily available
materials made them an obviously popular and practical building method, not all
builders loved it as a building material. The Roman architect Vetruvius, in the
first century AD, moaned about the hazards of such cheap material in his Ten
Books on Architecture:

“As for ‘wattle and daub’ I could wish that it had never
been invented,” Veruvius wrote. “The more it saves in time and gains in space,
the greater and the more general is the disaster that it may cause; for it is
made to catch fire, like torches. It seems better, therefore, to spend on walls
of burnt brick, and be at expense, than to save with ‘wattle and daub,’ and be
in danger. And, in the stucco covering, too, it makes cracks from the inside by
the arrangement of its studs and girts. For these swell with moisture as they
are daubed, and then contract as they dry, and, by their shrinking, cause the
solid stucco to split.

But since some are obliged to use it either to save time or
money, or for partitions on an unsupported span, the proper method of
construction is as follows. Give it a high foundation so that it may nowhere
come in contact with the broken stone-work composing the floor; for if it is
sunk in this, it rots in course of time, then settles and sags forward, and so
breaks through the surface of the stucco covering.” (6)

Coracles in Wales, courtesy of Wikicommons.

Improbable as it sounds, basketry has long been used to make
boats. How long we don’t know, but humans appeared in Australia 40,000 years
ago, even though it was separated from Asia even in the Ice Age. They might
have built wicker boats covered in animal skins, but even if they merely tied
logs together into rafts, they must have had the related technology of making
fibre and tying it into knots.

The Irish used woven boats, or coracles, for hundreds – and
probably thousands -- of years; they are mentioned in medieval Irish literature
and are still made by aficionados today. All were woven from willow or hazel
and covered with a hide – usually cow hide, but horse-hide and sealskin were
also used – and supposedly waterproofed with butter. All of them were
alarmingly tiny crafts in which a person sat cross-legged and sat carefully
upright to avoid tipping over, like a bowl-shaped kayak. The coracle’s small
size and lightweight construction ensured that, after the occupant had paddled
across rivers, lakes or marshes, he could pick up his boat and walk across
country with ease.

To take to the sea, the Irish wove curraghs -- larger and
oval-shaped to navigate across choppy waters, but still no larger than a
rowboat. Documentary footage from 1937 showed men constructing a Boyne curragh;
first planting hazel rods in the ground in the desired shape, and weaving a
tight frame between them along the ground – what would become the gunwale, or
rim, when the frame was flipped over. Then the hazel rods were twisted together
to make a wicker dome, and the frame was uprooted and turned upright and a hide
placed around the frame and oiled. (7)

One common use of such craft was to set and gather fish and
eel traps from rivers and lobster pots from the sea – also made, of course,
from wicker. Such foods were an important source of protein, especially in
Catholic countries where meat was sometimes forbidden. The traps operated on a
simple principle; a bit of bait could lure an animal into the trap but, if it
were shaped properly, they would be unable to escape.

….

Baskets can be woven with any one of hundreds of plant
species, depending on whatever was available. In more tropical climates people
used cane or raffia, while other peoples used straw or some other grass or
reed. In temperate areas like Europe a wide variety of branches and plants were
available: dogwood, privet, larch, blackthorn and chestnut branches; broom,
jasmine and periwinkle twigs; elm, and linden shoots; ivy, clematis,
honeysuckle and rose vines; rushes and other reeds, and straw.

Perhaps the most popular, however, was willow -- sallies or
silver-sticks here in Ireland, osiers in Britain, vikker in Old Norse, the last
of which became our word “wicker.” highly pliable when young or wet,
lightweight and tough when dried, and growing so quickly that a new crop of
branches up to two to three metres long can be harvested each year.

They are one of the earliest trees to grow back appear after
an old tree falls and leaves a gap of sunlight in the forest, or after a forest
fire razes an area, they are perhaps the tree closest to a weed in behaviour.
Their roots spread rapidly under the surface of the soil, making them an ideal
crop to halt erosion. Their fast growth makes an excellent windbreak, the basis
of most hedgerows, and makes them particularly useful in our era for
sequestering carbon and combating climate change. The bark of the white willow
(Salix alba) can be boiled to form acetecylic acid, or aspirin.

In addition, the common variety Salix viminalis or “basket
willow,” has been shown to be a hyper-accumulator of heavy metals. Many plants
help “clean” the soil by soaking up disproportionate levels of normally toxic
materials, either as a quirk of their metabolism or as a way of protecting
themselves against predators by making themselves poisonous. Many plants soak
up only a single toxin, others only a few; Viminalis, it turned out, soaked up a
broad range, including lead, cadmium, mercury, chromium, zinc, fossil-fuel
hydrocarbons, uranium, selenium, potassium ferro-cyanide and silver. (8) (9)
(10)

Many hardwood trees can be coppiced, cut through at the
base, or pollarded, cut at head-height , and regrow shoots on a
five-to-twenty-year time scale. Willows, however, do not need to grow to
maturity, and continue to thicken at the base and grow a fresh crop of shoots
each year. Basket-weavers here harvested willow as a winter ritual – ten tonnes
to the acre – from fields of large century-old stumps that had never been
mature trees. (11)

Once the willow is cut it could be dried with the bark on,
or the bark could be stripped off. Stripping was a tedious task but it made the
willow easier to quickly prepare and use, reduced the risk of decay, and it
gave the willow a valued white colour. To strip the bark a large willow branch
was cut partway down its length, with metal strips attached to the inside of
the cut; the weaver could hold the branch between their legs and use it as we
would use a wire-stripping tool to remove insulation. When cuttings were too
thick to manipulate, a special tool called a cleve was used to cut them three
ways down their length.

Withies were typically dried for several months and kept
indefinitely before soaking again for use. Willow can be woven straight from
the tree, but as it dries it loosens and the weave shifts and rattles, which is
seldom desirable. To a novice, preparing the materials presents as much of a
challenge as the actual weaving, as the willow must be dried but re-soaked,
kept wet without rotting, and used before becoming dry and brittle again.

Today a small but growing movement of people around the
world tries to rediscover and re-cultivate traditional crafts and technologies.
Many such techniques deserve to be revived; but some require substantial
experimentation, skill, training, infrastructure or community participation.
Not all low-tech solutions can be adopted casually by modern urbanites taking
their first steps toward a more traditional life.

Basket-weaving, however, requires no money other than that
needed for training and possibly materials. It uses materials easily found in
almost every biome on Earth, requires few if any tools. Highly skilled weavers
can create works of art, but simple and practical weaves can be done by almost
anyone. Out of hundreds of traditional crafts, none has so many everyday
applications.

C. D. Mell’s 1908 book Basket Willow Culture urged
farmers to grow willows as a cash crop to feed the continual demand of weaving
material, maintaining that “the demand for basket willow rods is very great and
every year many thousands of bundles of rods … are imported from France,
Germany and Holland.” Incredibly, it seemed that as highly valued as baskets
were in the USA, the then-sparsely-inhabited country was still importing willow
from comparatively small and crowded Old World countries. (12)

Friday, 2 November 2018

On these last brilliant autumn days, the hedgerows are giving
up the last of their fruits to the birds and local foragers. Red haws cluster
so thickly on the branches now that that they droop over the fields, on branches
so thin that they wobble even when tiny birds like hawfinches and thrushes land
to fatten up for winter.

When they pick one, other more overripe haws dropped
from the branches to the grass below, which rustled in response – mice or
voles, I supposed, waiting for treats like dogs under the table.

Sloes still cling tightly to their thorny branches, and the final
rose-hips dot the vines that wind their way up the trunks. Ours are tiny, wild
rose-hips, evolved to suit birds and not human foragers, but on my way to work
I pass a community garden with rose-hips the size of figs. I’d love to find out
what variety it is and plant some around us for making jam next autumn – roses are
pretty and all, but my tastes run to the practical.

I wondered why a garden in the grimy brewery district of
Dublin was doing so well, and then I realised – it’s around the corner from
where rows of horse-drawn carriages line up to take tourists around Dublin. Some
afternoons I see locals eagerly scooping up the manure and bringing it back to
their plot, sometimes in two giant bags hanging from their bicycle handles.

Recently I visited my neighbour down the road, an old man
who has lived in the area all his life, and who shows me the local castles and
graveyards here and talks about the history of all the local families. On the
day of our first frost, I knocked on his door to return a book, and I asked him
what kind of winter he expected.

“A harsh one, I think,” he said. “We’ve had a hot summer,
and we often get a harsh winter after that – as we did last year, with a metre
of snow. You can’t really say anymore these days,” he added, noting that the
weather was less predictable than it used to be.

We talked a bit about the hedgerows, and I noted how many
Americans didn’t have them – we all divided our properties with chain-link fences
that rusted, didn’t cut the wind, and didn’t offer privacy or food.

“People are tearing them down here too,” my neighbour said.
“It’s a shame – when we plant fields, we need the border to make the field work.”
He explained how their fruit brings birds that fertilise the fields, they keep
soil from escaping the field after a rain, and their hardy trees and wild
plants soak up whatever farmers spray on the crops.

Hedges along the hills in summer

That’s interesting, I said – that the wild borders were
necessary for the field to thrive. The Old Testament repeats over and over that
people are not to cut the edges of their land, and were always to leave some of
the crops left over – in Leviticus 19:9, for example. It was supposed to be for
gleaners and people who were poor, but I wonder if part of the reason,
consciously or unconsciously, was to also give some of it back to Nature. How
do most farmers here feel about these things?

“It depends on the farmer,” he said. “I was talking to a
neighbour here who decided to go organic. He had spread pesticides over the
fields every year, but he would come out and see it covered in dead worms
afterwards. He decided it wasn’t worth it anymore.”

I’ll be interested to hear how he gets on, I said. Although
pesticides aren’t exactly new here -- are the dead worms a new phenomenon? I
wonder if his pesticide changed. I had read a study last year that found that
tillage agriculture was harming worm populations, but I’m not sure if changing
to organic would help that.

I also find it interesting that no birds had snapped up the
dead worms – I was hearing someone the other day say that they remember as a
child seeing flocks of birds follow their tractor around after ploughing, but
now they don’t.

“That’s interesting,” he said. “I’ve noticed that birds used
to follow the cows around less than they used to.”

“What everyone used to do whenever they could was to let
ground rest for a while after growing things on it, or let cows graze on it,”
he told me. “That did the same thing the hedgerows do. The local landowner here,
around a hundred years ago, used to grow the best potatoes of anyone, as he
would grow them only on land that had been fallow the previous year. Of course,
that was because he had the extra land to do that.”

I often see that today, I said – upper-class people will do
well, and think it was all their own hard work. They might indeed have worked
hard, but people don’t see their own advantages.

Our hedge in winter

It made sense to me that that letting land “rest” would help
rejuvenate it; in the wild, a plot of barren land will quickly be covered by a
profusion of different species, which cover the ground, protect it from erosion
by rain, bloom with many different flowers, bring many different pollinators,
which feed different birds. They each bear different fruit or seeds, and many bring
in their own fungus or bacteria colonies with their roots. As the plants and
small critters spread across the surface of the soil, much more is growing
under it – from mushroom colonies to worms to tens of thousands of species of
tiny beasts, from miniature to microscopic – and once living things have done
their job, they turn them into soil again. In other words, the living system
takes the depleted funds of the soil and rebuilds a rich credit account of
nutrients, before we make a withdrawal and turn it into another round of crops
for ourselves.

I suppose most people just had a small plot, and only grew
potatoes? I asked.

“They had to,” he said. “Each person had so little land for
themselves, and nothing else would feed them all the time but potatoes. But it
meant you had to grow the same crops on the same land, over and over, and never
gave the land a rest. Nothing but the same plants tires out the land, taking
the same minerals from it year after year, and tires ground makes the plants
sickly. I know the blight was the main reason for the Famine, but I can’t help
but think that tiring out the land didn’t help.”

Tree along the canal near our house

That’s an interesting point, I said. I told him about the essay by Ugo Bardi some years ago, determining that soil erosion made the Famine
worse: After Britain conquered Ireland, its trees went to make up London’s
buildings and Britain’s fleet, and soil erosion took its toll on the deforested
land. I also told him that in America, there are vast areas where people only
grow corn, or wheat, year after year.

“I think we had the Famine because we pushed our land to its
limit,” my neighbour said. “And I think we’re doing it again.”